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The Enticement of Language Imagery
When I was young, admittedly many years ago, imagination was still A Thing. As a child, and then a young adult, we were called upon to use our imagination in order to play, to learn, to visualise anything which didn’t seem clear to us at first glance. The exhortation to use your imagination was part of daily language usage, and mostly came from those people around me who, through perhaps no fault of their own, were unable to gift enough time to explain something, or suffered a lack of understanding themselves. As a child, of course, imagination was part and parcel of being a child. The cardboard box as a…
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The Cultural Appropriation of Knowledge
Our modern world – when you listen to those shouting loudest who claim to be in the know – and especially the latest generations in the advanced West have discovered and created all that we know today. There is no history before 1776, there are no countries outside of the United States of America; the only language used throughout the world should be American [sic], and anywhere that has a city with the same name as one in the United States, is guilty of cultural appropriation. All worldly knowledge and wisdom originates from within the borders, the institutions, of the United States of America. Jesus Christ, we are told through…
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Journalism: Reading Beyond The Headlines
The headlines say it all: riots; looting; unrest; attacks against the police; police brutality; masked attackers; violence on the streets. Journalism, the mass media, is designed not just to inform and advise, but also to sell, whether it be advertising space or information, online or printed. Journalism is not there just to give the facts of an event, but also to give opinions and recommendations, depending on the bias of the publication, and what the journalists themselves – and their editors – believe they can get away with. A good headline sells more content, regardless of what the actual content is, because so many no longer read beyond the first…
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Journalism and Censorship: A Full Circle
The ideal of a Free Press, of a system of journalism reporting current events, politics, business, culture and social matters, is an ideal enshrined in modern society. It goes back over several hundred years to the smaller local news agencies, to hastily printed pamphlets, to the idea that the press, the newspapers they produced, the journalists working for them, should be able to report the facts without bias or fear for their lives. An ideal only, of course, as reporting the facts has always been a matter of interpretation, has always been subject to who we hear from and how the message is brought across. The press, regardless of its…
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The Best Defense: Attack
We live in times when certain forces around us, seen and unseen, defend themselves by attacking their assailants, real or imagined, by any means possible, and often by those means which we might consider not only underhand, but illegal. Illegality is, of course, something discerned by those in power, and not necessarily by the law books, by custom or any other means, including the law courts. There are enough examples of actions taken which have not only been widely condemned in the mass media and by the public, but ruled illegal by courts at all levels, and still ignored. The interested spectator need only take a quick glance at the…
